Raw Story As SARS-like virus hits 12th person, WHO urges countries to stay alert Raw Story The World Health Organisation on Saturday urged countries to be vigilant over the spread of a potentially fatal SARS-like virus after a new case in Britain...

Usutu Virus Highlights Importance of Disease Surveillance The Disease Daily A new virus previously only isolated in mosquitoes in tropical and subtropical Africa had somehow migrated to Europe and infected local bird species, which were susceptible...

Flow cytometry can now be officially used for the quantification of microbial cells in drinking water. The new analytical method provides much more realistic results than the conventional method, in which bacterial colonies are grown on agar plates.

Pretty much mirrors phage practicals we used to do in MCB here at UCT: tap water was always cleaner in terms of coliphages than bottled mineral water. I'd still go with phages over flow cytometry, though: it was exquisitely sensitive, and a LOT cheaper.

How bacteria adapt to antibiotics Health24.com Despite the remarkable success of antibiotics, bacterial infections remain a leading cause of death, and antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens is a significant threat to public health.

Colin Dale from the University of Utah discovered a new bacterium isolated from the infected wound of an Indiana man who impaled his hand on a tree branch. He and his team also found that the new bacterial strain, named HS, is related to Sodalis, a genus of bacteria that lives symbiotically inside insects’ guts in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships. The discovery solved an old mystery by showing that insects domesticate bacteria by picking them up from plants or animals in their environment, not from other insects. Colin Dale, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of biology, says the findings provide “a missing link in our understanding of how beneficial insect-bacteria relationships originate. Our work shows specifically that these relationships arise independently in each insect. This is a surprising conclusion: the insect picks up a pathogen that is widespread in the environment and then domesticates it. This happens independently in each insect.”

Add this to the murderous microbe highlight reel--a single strain of bacteria could have worsened the Great Dying event 250 million years ago, producing (Bacteria May Have Been Responsible For World's Biggest Extinction Event

If you haven’t got your Christmas tree up and trimmed already, why not make it microbiological?! A couple of weeks ago I came across this post on Exploring The Invisible (if you haven’t checked out this blog already, do so!

The 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics, each of which killed ≈1 million persons, arose through reassortment events. Influenza virus in humans and domestic animals could reassort and cause another pandemic.

Scientific hindsight shows that Google Flu Trends far overstated this year's flu season, raising questions about the accuracy of using a search engine, which Google and the media hyped as an efficient public health tool, to monitor the flu.

Nature's Declan Butler reported today on the huge discrepancy between Google Flu Trend's estimated peak flu levels and data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this winter.

Viral recombination is critical to understanding the evolution of viral groups and impacts vaccine design, but is poorly understood. In the poliovirus vaccine, recombination is one potential mode of failure where vaccine strains recombine to produce a pathogenic product. We combine gene synthesis and deep sequencing to generate a high-resolution recombination map of poliovirus, both as a model RNA virus and a continuing threat that has yet to be eradicated. This map shows that recombination is concentrated into hotspots and suggests that predictable and alterable motifs in the RNA sequence are associated with recombination frequency. We demonstrate the utility of these observations by re-designing a poliovirus strain to recombine more frequently than normal, facilitating future studies on the role of viral recombination during infection. This result suggests that a large-scale redesign of the entire poliovirus genome to dampen recombination may be feasible, with implications for producing safer and more stable live vaccines.

We know quite a bit about how the wild aurochs or their ilk evolved into tame, bossy cows and how the insignificant grass teosinte became nutritious maize, but what do we know about the evolution of microbes involved in food and drink production?

An engineered peptide provides a new prototype for killing an entire category of resistant bacteria by shredding and dissolving their double-layered membranes, which are thought to protect those microbes from antibiotics.

The ISME Journal: Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology is the official Journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology, publishing high-quality, original research papers, short communications, commentary articles and reviews in...

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